Shotlist

Presents a war correspondent's reports on Korea after its liberation from Japan in 1945 and after communist destruction of the country and its people in 1950.
Ken Smith sez: "Men of good will must kill and destroy to bring a swift end to death and destruction." This production, Armed Forces Screen Report #125, is nothing more than Signal Corps footage and stock music edited together and narrated by a nameless, unseen "war correspondent." It's not an especially interesting film to look at, but it is filled with excellent Korean war rhetoric.
"It was a quiet country back in 1945...I remember how restful the green rice paddies looked," the narrator begins. Now "the air is filled with bullets, not confetti" as "the communist monster" commits "terror and savagery beyond war alone." The strange Kremlin-as-puppet-master mindset of early fifties America reveals itself when the narrator informs us that the North Koreans are not to blame for this war. He excuses them as "primitive" and "misguided fools" who were "led to the slaughter" after being "perverted by those who would make all mankind their dupes in their lust for world control." "Communist imperialism is the REAL criminal!" he proclaims.
Another revealing sequence is one in which the narrator laments the loss of South Korea's "hard-won hopes for economic betterment." "These ashes were our reciept for the hundreds of millions of dollars -- the years of patient teaching of industrial techniques we'd lavished here," he mourns. In other words, the North Korean attack wasn't for simple strategic advantage or the result of generations of ethnic animosity -- it was a Commie-directed personal vendetta against us!
While we're shown footage of dead GIs being fingerprinting and having their rings removed on the battlefield, the narrator lambasts doubters and cynics and claims that those who criticize America's involvement in Korea are "the hard-boiled 'sophisticates' who scoffed at the stories of Dachau and Buchenwald." "The criminal is still at large! Its appetite for aggression unappeased!" the narrator cries, putting Korea in its proper Free World vs. Red Menace context. "If we value our lives, our homes, and our freedom, let us remember the Crime of Korea!"




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